One of Europe's few medieval cities left largely untouched, Bruges, in Belgium, was occupied by the Germans during the First World War but escaped the destruction of other Flemish cities. Jennifer Bieman/The London Free Press

BRUGES, Belgium – One of Europe’s best-preserved medieval cities, a storybook place with Gothic buildings, Bruges dodged some of the worst destruction the world had ever known a century ago.

Not an hour away, a stone’s throw by Canadian standards, are Passchendaele and Ypres – places seared into our history by the slaughter and devastation on the Western Front during the First World War.

As the centennial of the war’s end in November nears, what was happening here a century ago was as night-and-day different from what Canadians had expected as the fates that destroyed some ancient Flemish towns but left Bruges, a world heritage site and frequent movie backdrop, largely untouched.

Then, as so often now, reality and perception were cruelly different.

By April 1918, the war many thought would be over in months had already lasted four years. It was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914 – that’s what was widely believed when the men marched off in August that year to fight for king and country.

Everyone thought the allies – Britain and its empire, including Canada, and France, Russia and neutral Belgium, which was invaded – would make quick work of the aggressors.

British soldiers captured on the Western Front during the First World War are paraded through a square in Bruges in this undated photograph from the war.

On the opposing side, were Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

The soldiers, it was said, would be home by the time the snow flew.

Instead, machine gun bullets, poisonous gas and shrapnel flew on battlefields and trenches across France and Belgium for four long years. It was industrial slaughter,on a scale never seen before.

By spring 1918, Canadian troops had endured the chlorine gas attacks of Ypres and the mud and blood of Passchendaele, a battle that became symbolic of the war’s misery and futility.

Canadians had celebrated victories, too, including their hard-fought, nation-forging triumph over the Germans at Vimy Ridge in northern France in April 1917.

German army took over Bruges during WW1, used it as an operational HQ. They launched U-boats and submarines from the nearby port, let soldiers taking a break from the Western Front spend a couple of weeks in the city between battles. #IfYeBreakFaithpic.twitter.com/67nEeCmBek

But with a divisive military conscription in full swing, brought in by prime minister Robert Borden’s government in August 1917, and no end in sight to the bloodshed, Canadians were growing disillusioned.

“They were very what we’d call war-weary at this point,” said Western University public history professor Michelle Hamilton. “They’re still rationing food. They’re still knitting socks for soldiers, things like that. They’re getting tired.”

London, a city of only 50,000, was a district headquarters for military operations in Southwestern Ontario, the place where orders came from, where soldiers would sign up and train for the war effort.

But in contrast to the early wartime optimism, by year four soldiers were coming home with stunning regularity and horrific injuries – a grim reminder, Hamilton said, of just how bad things had become.

“Word does spread,” she said. “People are coming home and they’re missing arms and legs. They’ve got trench foot and some of them are dying from communicable diseases they’ve picked up because so many people are in a small and unsanitary place on the front.

“That full weight of what it was like is starting to permeate London’s consciousness.”

History professor Michelle Hamilton stands among First World War-era gravestones at Londonâs Woodland Cemetery. (MIKE HENSEN, The London Free Press)

It was all about to get worse.

One in five Canadian casualties during the war – a staggering toll of more than 45,000 dead and injured – came during the war’s final 100 days, between August and November 1918.

The lead-up came with a German spring offensive that March, designed to break the stalemate of trench warfare and charge the course of the war. The Germans made significant gains along the front, adding to turf they already held including Bruges, whose outlet to the Atlantic Ocean made it a key naval hub.

But an exhausted Germany paid dearly, losing 800,000 soldiers between March and July 1918 alone.

THE 1918 SPRING OFFENSIVE

Germany mounts co-ordinated attacks along the Western Front from March to July 1918.

Goal was to end the war before the United States, which had only entered the war in 1917, could send more reinforcements for the allies.

German army suffered 800,000 casualties but gained some ground.

After three years of trench warfare, the offensive restores open fighting and paves the way for the war-ending Hundred Days Offensive, in which Canada loomed large.

“They restored open warfare. We really had trench warfare for the three years up to that,” said First World War historian Tim Cook.

Although the allies also took heavy losses,too, Canadian soldiers were largely spared during the spring offensive. When it began, they were busy holding Vimy Ridge, which they’d seized the spring before from the Germans at a cost of more than 10,000 Canadian dead and wounded.

Yet to come, for Canada, was the war-ending Hundred Days Offensive, often called Canada’s Hundred Days because of its key role in the costly fight.

“The Canadians get pulled out of the line in late April and begin to train for the coming offensive,” Cook said.

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